Leaving the Vatican

Even though the Momo staircase at the Vatican museum has been photographed to death, as an architecture photographer I couldn't resist shooting them. It's certainly one of the most beautiful structures that I've seen.

I manually blended the three handheld exposures in Photoshop using auto-align layers to help the dynamic range, then used 3 other shots to remove people and just keep the one person for scale. I got lucky that he happened to be color coordinated with the stairs. Remaining editing was mostly a ton of selective dodging and burning, sharpening and tonal adjustments.